The PR2 robot, developed by Willow Garage, practises its alien greeting

lockIf aliens from beyond our solar system or even our galaxy were to land on Earth and wanted to communicate with intelligent machines that can move around and shake hands, chances are that one of the first in line to greet our otherworldly visitors will be a robot with a brain built using the Robot Operating System.

The simple reason for this is that ROS is one of the most ubiquitous platforms for robotics in the world today, helped largely by the fact that it is an open-source project, in contrast to the majority of robot operating systems which are proprietary and closed.

In addition, TRI has made a charitable contribution of $1 million to OSRF to support the organization’s goals to develop and promote the growth of the open source robotics community and to support the development of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo.

Gill Pratt, TRI CEO, says: “I’ve witnessed first-hand the value of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. Of the 23 teams that competed in the Darpa Robotics Challenge 18 used ROS and 14 used Gazebo.

After releasing its deep learning or machine learning library TensorFlow as open source software a few months ago, Google has now followed up by open sourcing TensorFlow Serving, which the company says makes it easier to take models into production.

Noah Fiedel, Google software engineer, writes on his blog: “TensorFlow Serving makes the process of taking a model into production easier and faster.

“It allows you to safely deploy new models and run experiments while keeping the same server architecture and APIs.”

TensorFlow Serving is written in C++ and supports Linux. Fidel says the software requires minimal overhead. “In our benchmarks we recoded approximately 100,000 queries per second per core on a 16 vCPU Intel Xeon E5 2.6 GHz machine, excluding gRPC and the TensorFlow inference processing time.”